Friending

QUESTION

Dear Irene:

My BFF from high school and I were so tight--even beyond our school years. We never had a falling out or a fight, just suddenly stopped talking a few years ago. I friended her on Facebook recently. She friended me back...and then, total silence on both our parts for many, many months.

It's awkward. I still do care about her dearly. So strange to look at her life without me in it in any way. She feels like a stranger. Was it wrong to request her friendship on Facebook before clearing the air? Should I let more time pass? Make the first move? Any advice you can share about a failed friendship and Facebook would be very helpful!

Janene

ANSWER

Dear Janene:

During the high school and college years, women (and men) change tremendously as they begin to mature and pursue their life goals, both personal and professional. Because so much change takes place, it's common for friendships, even very close ones, to fall apart as lives and interests diverge.

Since you friended your BFF on Facebook and she responded, there must still be some warm feelings between you. But they may be based on shared history alone rather than based on a connection between the two people you have become.

She has become somewhat of a stranger to you now as you are to her. Why don't you send her an email or private message on Facebook and tell her a little bit about your life since you last knew each other? You can mention that you think of her dearly. See if she responds.

But please don't think of the friendship you had as one that failed. It worked for that period of time. And don't have unrealistic expectations of picking it up where you left it because it may or may not work now.

In any case, you have little to lose by reaching out and trying.

Best,
Irene

This blog post originally appeared on the Long Island Exchange relationship blog of Janene Mascarella.

Having a hard time time cutting off a toxic friendship? Social networks not only make it easier to collect “friends,” they make "defriending" a breeze because it just takes one simple stroke of the keyboard.

In the real world, according to an article in UK Times Online, most people have about five close friends and an extended network of 150 people who they consider more distant acquaintances. (That number is based on a study conducted in the 1990s at Liverpool University in northwest England.) In cyberspace, users of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have about the same number of close friends but often collect huge numbers of virtual friends, a phenomenon dubbed “MySpace whoring.” When numbers get that large, the ties become more tenuous.

Speaking to the British Association (BA) Festival of Science at York University Dr. Will Reader of Sheffield Hallam University points out that social networks make it easy to friend and defriend. If someone is annoying or isn’t behaving acceptably, you can simply take them off your list of friends.

“Normally a friendship will fade out,” says Dr. Reader. “You gradually lose contact. On these sites you remove them. It’s a type of spring clean and the other persons know they’ve been removed,” adds Reader.

Given the pervasive myth of BFF, seems like it is never easy to end a friendship even if you have a button to help do the job.